Shear Stress Sensors / Inline Viscometers for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Use of High-Shear Mixers (HSMs) is ubiquitous in pharmaceutical manufacturing. They provide significantly shorter mixing cycles to radically improve throughput compared with conventional mixers. HSMs can be used to facilitate crystallization by creating supersaturated liquids, and can be used to produce particular drug polymorphs during mixing. Though high-shear mixers are powerful tools, there are a number of challenges that process engineers face when using them, including overprocessing, underprocessing, and scaling up from the laboratory bench to the factory floor.

Lenterra’s RealShear™ series of sensors make it possible to directly measure wall shear stress in real time. This critical knowledge enables:

• Rapid scale-up from the high-shear mixing laboratory to the production floor replacing the costly and time-consuming trial-and-error process.
• Operator or automatic intervention to prevent spoiled batches
• Precision tuning of process parameters to aid crystallization or drug polymorph production, and to eliminate need for processing aids
• Avoidance of over-processing of products, resulting in improved throughput
• Reduction in post-production testing due to more precisely controlled processing

Download a Whitepaper on Lenterra Shear Stress Sensors for High-Shear Mixers (PDF)

Other Resources

RealShear™ F-Series Sensors
Application Note on Viscosity Measurement with RealShear Sensors (PDF)
Technical Background on Lenterra’s Micro-Optical Shear Stress Sensors.
LOC-F Optical Controller